![]() ![]() Prevalence rates among older persons for FOF range from 20 to 39% overall and from 40 to 73% in those who have fallen.Falls self-efficacy can be defined as 'a person's belief in their ability to undertake certain activities of daily living without falling or losing balance. The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health and UC Riverside.Fear of falling (FOF) describes a phobic reaction to standing or walking (called “ptophobia”) and also includes reductions in balance self-efficacy, nervous anticipation of falling, and/or a harmful avoidance of activity resulting from FOF. The researchers also plan to develop strategies to suppress pathological fear memories in PTSD.Ĭho was joined in the study by Woong Bin Kim, a postdoctoral researcher in his laboratory. The brain then integrates these sensory signals as a highly abstract form - the context - and forms a memory that associates the traumatic event with the context. This associative memory makes us feel afraid of that, or similar, situation and we avoid such threatening situations.”Īccording to Cho, during the car accident, the brain processes a set of multisensory circumstances around the traumatic event, such as visual information about the place, auditory information such as a crash sound, and smells of burning materials from damaged cars. This is because our brains form a memory that associates the car accident with the situation where we experienced the trauma. ![]() We would then feel afraid of that - or similar - place even long after we recover from the physical injury. “Suppose we had a car accident in a particular place and got severely injured. “The neural mechanism of learned fear has an enormous survival value for animals, who must predict danger from seemingly neutral contexts,” Cho said. This process is dysregulated, however, in PTSD, where overgeneralized and exaggerated fear responses cause symptoms including nightmares or unwanted memories of the trauma, avoidance of situations that trigger memories of the trauma, heightened reactions, anxiety, and depressed mood. ![]() A psychiatric disorder that can occur in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event, such as war, assault, or disaster, PTSD can cause problems in daily life for months, and even years, in affected persons.Ĭho explained the capability of our brains to form a fear memory associated with a situation that predicts danger is highly adaptive since it enables us to learn from our past traumatic experiences and avoid those dangerous situations in the future. Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, affects 7% of the U.S. “Our study, therefore, also provides insights into developing therapeutic strategies to suppress maladaptive fear memories in post-traumatic stress disorder patients,” he said. Our study now demonstrates for the first time that the formation of fear memory associated with a context indeed involves the strengthening of the connections between the hippocampus and amygdala.”Īccording to Cho, weakening these connections could erase the fear memory. “Experimental evidence, however, has been weak. “It has been hypothesized that fear memory is formed by strengthening the connections between the hippocampus and amygdala,” said Jun-Hyeong Cho, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular, Cell and Systems Biology and the study’s lead author. Jun-Hyeong Cho (left), an assistant professor of molecular, cell, and systems biology, is seen here with Woong Bin Kim, his postdoctoral researcher.
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